Towards a more perfect union (Warriors 102, Pistons 98)

The raw number 6-0—even with Steph (and McCaw and Zaza) out—only begins to tell in crude shorthand the story of the concluding games of this past roadtrip.

The more complete story is about the W’s growing—in fits and starts—in the direction of a growing coherence. Steph’s absence doesn’t require that the W’s develop a new, separate identity. But it does require them to bring back up to the surface and develop more fully layers of their identity that can often lie dormant during ordinary regular season time.

And that’s a good thing.

The patience of go-to scorers

Post-game after the not-long-ago loss to the Kings, I heard as reliably as I could ever hear…

“I expected Klay to take some bad shots. I expected him to try to take too much of Steph’s absence onto his own shoulders.”

Klay’s notably learned from that lesson and in the past two games during Steph’s absence has been remarkably patient offensively. No one is more impacted by Steph’s absence than Klay. For instance, Steph’s absence freed Stan Van Gundy to focus Avery Bradley entirely on Klay. Bradley had a remarkable game and defended Klay as well as anyone could. But Klay cut and moved without the ball, missed some early 3’s, took no bad shots, stayed within himself, and in late-game eye-blink openings was involved in making many of the critical plays that sealed the win.

Kevin Durant’s situation is even more complex. One of the greatest individual scorers to ever play the game, in Steph’s absence he initiates offense more and more. It’s more complex than one might initially think for a truly great ingrained scorer to initiate offense. I loved that (in general) both Klay and Durant didn’t look to score primarily on their first touch (unless it was a clear catch-and-shoot). But as more of a playmaker (without Steph) KD was (understandably) more of a mixed mind about this. Some possessions he was the epitome of a “come, double me” pass-first distributor, and sometimes he iso-ed less than another great scorer might, but more than is optimal in the W’s ideal “trust-the-pass” system.

No surprise in this. That Steph’s absence invites Durant to further growth (beyond simplicities of mere scoring) is only the most recent testimony to Durant’s true overall greatness as a player.

Scrambling late-game defense

While the W’s have often played solid team defense for stretches in regular season games recently, it’s been awhile since they’ve full-blown scrambled and turned-over an opponent defensively down the stretch of a close game.

But last night they were once again (down the stretch) a school of piranha feeding on a game they had determinedly set out to win.

The block-numbers will garner the headlines. But in the best defensive sequences blocks are just the punctuation. To my mind, it was the active, aggressive, anticipatory swarming and rotations and collective foresight of the W’s late-game defense that dictated to the Pistons situations they didn’t want to be in to begin with.

It was Livingston, Klay, Iguodala, Draymond, and Durant who closed out the final 5 minutes of the game.

Continuing nuanced rotation possibilities

It seemed a particularly tricky game in which (as a fan) to advance rotation preferences. All four W’s centers contributed in different ways. Quinn Cook made his second straight persuasive argument that not only is he an “NBA player” but that he could even serve as a solid member of an NBA champion’s rotation. (Of course, McCaw and a guy named Steph will be coming back:)

It was notable that after the W’s second quarter slide that Kerr went to Casspi and Cook ahead of Nick Young in the 3rd quarter in an attempt to correct (and avoid) another backslide. But that needs to be placed into the context that Young is simultaneously increasingly more conscientious in understanding (and executing) what playing in the W’s system requires.

There’s an intrinsic necessary underlying beauty in the rhythm between the W’s go-to scorers and the keep-the-flow-going of the W’s offense as a whole.